Hidden Identity

In the coming months, solution providers should expect this situation to change,but it won't be because of the efforts of vendors. No, the biggest proponent of the identity-management issue these days is Citibank, which is running a series of hilarious television commercials and print ads focused on identity theft.

Although this campaign focuses on consumers, it does more to raise the visibility of related identity-management issues than all the efforts of the computer industry combined because it brings these concerns to the attention of CEOs across the United States.

But awareness is not the only factor holding back the deployment of identity-management solutions. Within IT organizations, the responsibility for identity management usually falls like a Texas League single between different groups that have nominal responsibility for the function.

On the one hand, there is the security team, but for better or worse, most of these people are focused on the network perimeter and generally have given very little thought to applications or data security. The other player that could make decisions is the application management team, which tends to view iden-tity management as a glorified term for single sign-on passwords rather than as a critical cross-enterprise initiative. To the latter, the issue is about reducing the cost of labor associated with supporting end users who can't remember their passwords.

So at the end of the day, vendors such as RSA, IBM, Novell, Sun, Microsoft, Oblix, Netegrity, VeriSign, BMC, Courion, Aventail, Infoblox and Waveset continue to wax philosophical about the need for identity management. But when it comes to actually educating and motivating the channel and customer prospects about the importance of identity management, nobody really has stepped up to the plate.

Can you identify? I can be reached at (516) 562-7477 or via e-mail at [email protected].